Some cloud-based or on-premises environment/system infrastructures can be used to execute an application service. For example, SAP® HANA® Extended Application Services, Advanced model (“XSA”) is a platform that can be used to develop and execute microservice-based applications in a cloud-based or on-premises environment/system. Such an infrastructure may offer a set of services that enable end-to-end support for web-based applications including persistency services and a configurable identity provider. In addition, such a platform may support polyglot application development with a core set of pre-deployed runtimes that are accepted as industry standards (e.g., Node.js or Java platform Enterprise Edition (“JavaEE”)).
Modern web applications are often built on the basis of hundreds or even thousands of software components (e.g., open source components like java archives (“jar”) or Node.js modules (“npm”)). When these types of applications are pushed to a platform, a substantial number of components or artifacts may be involved in productive code. Moreover, a noticeable number of these artifacts may be added by the platform infrastructure itself to the application during a deployment process (which may not be not fully transparent and/or controllable for customers). Artifacts added by the platform could be, for example, frameworks, database drivers, crypto libraries, etc. As hundreds of different application (e.g., microservice) deployments might be managed by a platform, hundreds of thousands of artifacts in total might end up being deployed to the server. These artifacts can appear in many variations: in the same or different versions of a single component; as a productive part of an application currently running and serving as an Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”) endpoint; or even as part of a stopped service that could be subsequently activated. As a result, customers of a cloud-based or on-premises environment/system infrastructure (e.g., a Platform-as-a-Service (“PaaS”)) risk that they are not in a position to quickly get insights about current artifact states and usage.
It would therefore be desirable to provide for the automatic creation of an artifact report associated with a cloud-based or on-premises environment/system infrastructure in a fast, automatic, and accurate manner.